Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.